


two steps forward

by cirrus (themorninglark)



Series: Green Light [4]
Category: Free!
Genre: Friendship, Future Fic, Gen, Makoto introspection, OT3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 15:29:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4105927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themorninglark/pseuds/cirrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Makoto is not a sentimental person.</p>
            </blockquote>





	two steps forward

Makoto is not a sentimental person, and no one is more surprised by this than he is, to be honest. He remembers being the boy who planted flowers and buried his goldfish. He remembers his first encounter with death, and the resulting fear he left behind, partway, on a jagged rock of an island.

It is inconvenient, this truth. _Did you miss me?_

"Yes," Makoto always says, out loud, with a smile. "Of course I did."

And whoever he's speaking to - Ran, Ren, sometimes Nagisa - beams right back at him, sometimes over a Skype webcam window, sometimes over the phone (he can _hear_ it in their voices). Sometimes in person.

And Makoto thinks, yes, but also, _no_.

It's not that he doesn't know what it feels like, to miss someone. In fact, it's the opposite.

Makoto has never known what it's like _not_ to miss someone or something; whether it's the sight of Haruka in the water, or Rin under the sakura tree, and he is not a sentimental person because if the years have taught him anything, it is that he can live with this feeling and move on, move  _forward_ , put one foot in front of the other -

He will not dwell in the missing, because he has made his peace with it.

He's learned to.

He's had to, in between hurried glimpses of his best friends beneath glittering lights, text messages and quick words exchanged before and after their races, photographs snapped on phones for posterity, against the backdrop of at least five different countries and a dozen other cities.

For them, Makoto's even managed to get over his fear of flying.

He is sitting in a ramen shop now. It different from how he remembers it. They have changed the stools over the years, swapping out the gaudy turquoise for a more muted, dark cherry red. The posters on the wall have been updated. But the one on the far left, overlooking the counter, hasn't changed; _kokoro_ , it says. Heart.

At the end of the day, after all is said and done, there's comfort in the fact that this is what they've come down to all over again.

And this is the futility of sentiment; the funny, karmic truth that the future, hazy speculation and all, sometimes proves itself so much like the past that it's kind of silly to think, _this might be the last time we ever eat this ramen -_

There's a jingling from the front as the shop door opens.

Makoto looks up.

_Because, seven years later, you find yourself back here again._

"Yo. Makoto."

_Just with different people._

It's not the same, never exactly the same, but that doesn't make it better or worse. 

It just makes it -

 _now_...

And who has time to be sentimental about the past, when he's  _here_ , here and now, and this moment is all he has with his friends?

A familiar blue and white jacket appears from behind Rin. Haruka steps over the threshold of their old haunt, slides the shop door closed in one elegant motion, with slightly less noise than Rin had opened it.

"Did you miss us?" asks Rin, as he walks over and sits down next to Makoto.

Haruka moves round to sit on Makoto's other side. He doesn't say anything, merely smiles, a quiet, knowing smile.

"Yes," Makoto says.

 


End file.
